Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses the music biz with Tim Quirk, songwriter and musician for the pop group Wonderlick who is known best as a member of Too Much Joy:
It could be argued that the labels have been killing themselves for 15, maybe 20 years — they stopped doing any serious artist development at least that long ago. Jac Holtzman, who signed the doors and founded Elektra, told me that in the ’60s and ’70s, if a musician had the goods he would eventually make it. He said he left the business when that stopped being the case. By 1990, my band was basically given six weeks to break on radio, and if it didn’t happen the label just stopped pushing the record. When I tell folks that today, they say, “Six weeks? What a luxury.”
The interview covers a lot of ground in suprising depth for a blog post. [via The Shifted Librarian]
